Harold E. Palmer

“ The student who has passed through an unsound elementary course finds his road to progress barred; the twig has been badly bent, the foundations have been badly laid. All we can then do is to endeavour by means of a corrective course to undo the mischief which has been done, and a thankless task it is. No amount of advanced work can fully compensate or make good the harm which has been wrought by the untrained or unwise teacher. It is too late. Certain habits have been formed, and we all realize what it means to eradicate a bad habit and to replace it by a good one. ”

“ We readily plead guilty to a firm insistence on habit-forming exercises and drills, but continue to urge in mitigation that the practical study of language, the mastery of any form of actual speech, is a habit-forming process and little else. We must have the courage and honesty to face facts as we find them: a language cannot be mastered by learning interesting things about that language, but only by assimilating the material of which that language is made up. ”

“ The term ‘multiple line of approach’ implies that we are to proceed simultaneously from many different starting-points towards one and the same end; we use each and every method, process, exercise, drill, or device which may further us in our immediate purpose and bring us nearer to our ultimate goal; we adopt every good idea and leave the door open for all future developments; we reject nothing except useless and harmful forms of work. ”

“ Let us be quite sure we understand what we mean by the term ‘accuracy.’ There is, of course, no such thing as intrinsic or unconditioned accuracy; the term is a relative and not an absolute one; this word, and its synonyms ‘correctness,’ ‘rightness,’ and the adjectives ‘accurate,’ ‘correct,’ ‘right,’ ‘good,’ ‘proper,’ etc., all imply conformity with a given standard or model. If the dialect we are learning is an unclassical one, differing appreciably from the literary form, then accuracy will consist, among other things, in not using the literary or traditionally correct forms. ”

“ Language-study is such a complex thing, with so many aspects, and it requires to be looked at from so many points of view, that we must enlist all our capacities when striving to obtain the mastery we desire; we must not neglect our spontaneous powers, nor should we despise our intellectual powers; both are of service to us, both have their place in a well-conceived programme of study, each will to a certain extent balance the other and be complementary to it. ”

“ Language-learning, like all other arts as contrasted with sciences, is a habit-forming process. Proficiency in the understanding of the structure of a language is attained by treating the subject as a science, by studying the theory; but proficiency in the use of a language can only come as a result of perfectly formed habits. No foreign word, form, or combination of these is ‘known’ or ‘mastered’ until we can use it automatically, until we can attach it to its meaning without conscious analysis, until we can produce it without hesitation and conscious synthesis. ”

“ The most natural form of work, indeed the first form of work which suggests itself to us, consists in talking to our pupils, talking to them naturally and fluently, talking to them about anything which may conceivably be of interest to them. We may show them the different parts of the room in which the lessons are given, the furniture, objects on the table or in our pockets, and while showing them we name them and speak about them. ”

“ The Sense of Progress Achieved.—All work becomes more interesting when we are conscious that we have made and are making progress in that work. That sense of discouragement which is so inimical to interest arises when, in spite of our efforts, we seem to be no nearer to our goal. Statistics compiled by those who have made a special study of the psychology of learning show us that periods frequently occur in which there is no apparent progress and during which, as a necessary consequence, the interest of the student diminishes. ”

“ J’ai écrit, il y a quelques années, un livre, The Scientific Study and Teaching of Languages, auquel j’avais donné la forme d’une étude soulevant des questions nouvelles, sujettes à controverse et montrant qu’en réalité la science de l’étude des langues n’existait pas et qu’il était grand temps de rassembler les matériaux et les études permettant de lui donner un point de départ sérieux. ”

“ We hear a foreign word or sentence, and this auditory impression is such a rapid and transitory one that we feel that we cannot possibly retain it in our memory; we feel that we require at least one good look at the word so that we may hereafter reproduce in our imagination the written form. But we must resist this tendency; we must discipline ourselves to forgo this artificial aid to memory, for ear-memory cannot be cultivated while we are visualizing. If we truly desire to tap the natural language-learning energies we must obey nature ”

“ No reasonable doubt remains: we are all endowed by nature with certain capacities which enable each of us, without the exercise of our powers of study, to assimilate and to use the spoken form of any colloquial language, whether native or foreign. We may avail ourselves of these powers by training ourselves deliberately to utilize them, or, having more confidence in our studial efforts, or for some reason of special expediency, we may choose to leave our spontaneous capacities in their latent state and make no use of them. ”

“ What are the qualities which mark the successful student? What sort of people are likely to study with success? Of what people can we predict failure or incapacity for making progress? Most people will answer: The student must possess intelligence, assiduity, and perseverance; if at the same time he should be ‘gifted,’ his progress will be much greater than the progress of one [34] who possesses no ‘natural talents’ for learning the art in question. ”

“ If a student who is willing to learn and is capable of learning finds his lessons too difficult, if he fails to understand or to apply correctly the explanations we give him, if his rate of progress is too slow, if he forgets frequently what he has already learnt, and if his oral or written work is characterized by an excessive degree of inaccuracy, it is perfectly certain that his course and his lessons are badly graded. ”

“ Anyone who experiences a difficulty in repeating a foreign sentence which he has just heard will be severely handicapped in his subsequent work, for he will be paying attention to his hearing and articulation when he should be devoting his attention to other things. Indeed, we would go so far as to say that the power of correctly reproducing a string of syllables just heard is one of the essential things we must possess in order to make any real progress in the acquisition of the spoken language. ”

“ Whether our purpose is the complete mastery of the language in all its aspects and branches, or whether our purpose is a more special one, the principle holds good: we adopt the best and most appropriate means towards the required end. ”

“ For we must remember that, after all, traditional orthography is not a whit more ‘natural’ than shorthand, and a good deal less ‘natural’ than phonetic transcription or reformed spelling.
To learn, however, the written form of a language before having learnt how to assimilate the spoken form is unnatural and contrary to all our linguistic instincts; it is comparable to learning to cycle before having learnt to walk. ”

“ A child of two or three years of age can use the spoken language appropriate to his age, but what does that child know of reasoning? And what is its standard of intelligence? Not enough to cause it to realize or understand that two and two make four. And yet that child observes with a marvellous degree of accuracy most of the complicated laws governing his mother-tongue. And the savage. By definition he is unintelligent, he has never learnt to think logically, he has no power of abstraction, he is probably unaware that such a thing as language exists ”

“ A fallacy exists in connexion with interest, a fallacy which is the cause of much error and of much bad [138] teaching. This fallacy when reduced to the absurd consists in saying, “We can make a subject of study interesting by changing the subject of study.” Now obviously it is absurd to say that we can make the study of French interesting by teaching geometry in its stead, or that we can make arithmetic interesting by replacing the arithmetic lesson by a history lesson. And yet this is the sort of thing that frequently does take place in some form or other. ”

“ We hear a foreign sentence as pronounced at a normal speed by a native speaker. If we understand this sentence as soon as it falls from his lips, if we understand it without being conscious of its form or without even realizing that we are listening to a foreign language, we ‘possess’ that sentence, it forms part of the material which we have gained as the result of a habit ”

“ We may sow, and be assured that the harvest will be reaped in due time; the natural powers of language-study work surely but not rapidly; nature takes her time but yields a generous interest. With a long period in front of us, we may afford adequate intervals for ‘incubation’; it will not be necessary for us to accelerate the normal process of assimilation, but merely to let it develop in a gradual but ever-increasing and cumulative ratio. At the end of, let us say, the first year, our student will easily outstrip those whose initial progress seemed more satisfactory. ”

“ They are content to teach as they themselves have been taught, or to learn as others have learnt before them, without inquiring whether the plan or the programme is a sound one, without even inquiring whether the method is one which is likely to produce any good results whatever. But the serious teacher or student, who wishes to perform efficient work, must of necessity ask himself whether the path he has chosen is one which will lead anywhere near the desired end or ends. ”

“ Nearly all the time spent by the teacher in explaining why such and such a form is used and why a certain sentence is constructed in a certain way is time lost, for such explanations merely appease curiosity; they do not help us to form new habits, they do not develop automatism. Those who have learnt to use the foreign language and who do use it successfully have long since forgotten the why and the wherefore; they can no longer quote to you the theory which was supposed to have procured them their command of the language. ”

“ The art of literary composition, the art of selecting and assembling deliberately and consciously those words which express our thoughts and emotions in the clearest and most appropriate manner, differs widely and essentially from the art of colloquy as exercised in our daily life. In order to become proficient in literary composition, we must acquire habits of concentration, we must be able to analyse, we must become expert in synthesis, we must learn to discriminate, we must develop our intelligence. The young child cannot do these things, nor can the savage or the idiot. ”

“ Semantics teaches us the meaning of words, of inflexions, and of compounds; it shows us how to transform our thoughts into language, to select the most appropriate word or form, and to interpret correctly what we hear and read. It is more especially this branch which teaches us the differences in style and dialect, and enables us to distinguish the colloquial from the classical and to keep either from contaminating the other.
If we are to judge by the average teacher and the average language-course, the principle of proportion is usually violated by teaching:
(a) No phonetics at all. ”

“ The fear of monotonous and tedious memorizing work, and the realization of the length of time necessary for each act of memorizing, induce the student to invent pretexts for avoiding such work. He declares that ‘parrot-work’ is not education, that modern educationalists condemn ‘learning by rote,’ that the age of blind repetition is over and that the age of intelligent understanding has taken its place. He will talk of the method of discovery, the factor of interest, and will even quote to us ‘the laws of nature’ in defence of his thesis. ”

“ When we are older we form new habits with greater difficulty and certainly with greater reluctance. We make all sorts of efforts (generally unconsciously) to avoid forming a new habit, for in some respects the adult seems to dread novelty.
A new sort of work has to be performed, and instead of acquiring the new habit or habits which will perform it we select habits already formed and strive to make them do the new work. ”

“ No work is likely to be successfully accomplished if the student is not interested in what he is doing, but in our efforts to interest the pupil we must take care that the quality of the teaching does not suffer. Habit-forming work has the reputation of being dull and tedious. The remedy, however, would not be to abandon it in favour of work which in itself is or seems more interesting (such as reading, composition, and translation exercises) , [27] for by so doing we should merely be leaving undone work which must be done. ”

“ There is, however, this danger: these interesting and mind-developing methods do not tend towards automatism and habit-formation; they are, indeed, not intended to foster any form of mechanical command.
Proficiency in shorthand cannot be gained by any method of discovery, and the capacity for doing good and rapid work on a typewriter is not attained by the heuristic method. Mathematics is a science, but the absolute mastery of the multiplication table is an art and cannot be gained by the exclusive practice of playing with cubes. ”

“ In choosing the units of our vocabulary we may be guided by several considerations, such as intrinsic utility, sentence-forming utility, grammatical function, regularity, facility, concreteness, or completeness. We observe the principle of proportion when we select the material of our vocabularies in such a way that due attention is paid to all such desiderata, and without exaggerating the importance of any of them. ”

“ Some wish to possess an ‘understanding’ knowledge only, while others are content merely to make themselves understood.
The student may limit his requirements to a very superficial knowledge of some pidgin form of the language, and will be perfectly happy if he just succeeds in making himself understood by using some atrocious caricature of the language which he is supposed to be learning. Or he may be more ambitious and set out in earnest to become master of the living language just as it is spoken and written by the natives themselves. ”

“ Are we to study with conscious attention or with effortless attention? In the average lesson or language-course, the former alone is considered, but the young child, or the adult assimilating a language under ideal conditions, knows no other than the latter. ”

“ It is during the first stage that we can secure habits of accuracy, that we can train the student to use his ears, [69] that we can develop his capacities of natural and rapid assimilation, that we can foster his powers of observation. Good habits are easily formed (as also are bad habits) ; at the outset of his studies the learner, whoever he may be, educated or illiterate, child or adult, enjoys the advantage of a plastic mind; it can be shaped according to our will; we can train it to form good and sound habits of language-study. ”

“ We have acquired this proficiency not by a course of study as we understand the term in its ordinary use; we have not learnt it as a result of lectures or lessons; it has not come as a consequence of deliberate effort and concentration. Some of us, in exceptional circumstances, may have availed ourselves of our intelligence; but in general our intelligence, our reasoning powers, our capacities for deduction, for analysis and synthesis, have counted for nothing in the process. ”

“ Evidently it will not be possible to draw up a programme of study which will be suitable for all the diverse requirements we have set forth. Nor will it be possible for every teacher to consider the individual requirements of each one of his pupils. We cannot have a specially printed course, nor even a manuscript one, for every student; but in the case of private lessons or of self-instruction we may certainly give a large amount of consideration to individual needs. ”

“ Few people learn anything well unless they are interested in what they are learning. Hope of reward and fear of punishment are certainly stimuli to work, but very poor stimuli compared with that represented by interest. If the method is the machinery of language-study (or any other study for the matter of that) , then interest is the motive power. Be the clock ever so well and ingeniously constructed, it will not go without some sort of mainspring; be the method ever so efficient as a method, it will not work unless the student is interested. ”

“ It is a subject of debate whether we ought to use explanations at all for the purpose of teaching anyone to use a language. Some maintain that we should no more explain a point of theory to a schoolchild or an adult than we should to a child of eighteen months. The young child, it is said, learns to speak the language which he hears around him by dint of sheer imitation ”

“ If we compel a student to utter foreign words before he has learnt how to make the requisite foreign sounds, if we compel him to write a composition in a foreign language before he has become reasonably proficient in sentence-building, or if we compel him to talk to us in the foreign language before he has done the necessary drill-work, we are compelling him to use the pidgin form of the language. ”